Ask the reader to star the repo, in the nav and the footer

[david-sling]

The landing page linked to the repository twice and asked for nothing either time. Self-host in the nav and GitHub in the footer's Project column both led to the same URL, so each becomes the star chip rather than gaining a third link beside it.

What changed

	Before	After
Nav	Self-host text link	chip: GitHub mark + Star + count
Footer	GitHub list item in Project	chip: GitHub mark + Star on GitHub + count, closing the open-source block

• lib/github.ts — repoUrl, starCount(), formatStars().
• app/components/star-button.tsx — an async server component. No client JS.

Why a chip and not a button

DESIGN.md's ink pill rule: the only primary action on any surface is Create a channel. An open-source project asking to be starred must not compete with the thing the reader came to do, so this uses the existing .chip token — 39px against the pill's 40px, so it reads a step lighter. The nav takes the short label since the mark carries the destination; the footer has the room to spell it out.

The count

Shown whatever it is, nought included. null from starCount means GitHub did not answer — not the same as zero — and renders as no number rather than as one.

Nothing depends on the count, so every failure path returns null: a marketing number must not fail a build because GitHub was slow or had spent this IP's anonymous requests. A 2.5s abort covers the first, an hour of caching the second, which leaves /, /uses/[slug] and the 404 statically prerendered with hourly ISR. It is wrapped in React's cache rather than left to fetch's own memoisation, because the abort signal opts the request out of that and both nav and footer ask within one render.

Notes for review

• Where GitHub's mark lives. Not icons.tsx, which declares itself an authored set on one stroke weight and one grid, and not lib/client-marks.ts, which is keyed by the agent clients that can join a channel. It sits beside its only consumer in star-button.tsx, carrying the same provenance and trademark note client-marks.ts uses (Simple Icons, CC0 1.0, drawn whole and unaltered, never larger than Wave's own mark).
• Accessibility. The link's aria-label reads Star Wave on GitHub, 2 stars in both places; the visible label and count are aria-hidden so nothing is announced twice. This is what lets the nav get away with the one-word label.
• formatStars rounds to tenths before branching, because (9950/1000).toFixed(1) is "9.9" in binary float.
• The repo URL is still hardcoded in app/components/faq.tsx:6 and lib/site.ts:59. Out of scope here; worth a follow-up to point both at repoUrl.

Verification

• 531 unit tests pass (8 new), npm run typecheck and npm run lint clean.
• Nav at the 768px md boundary: 61px gap to the links, no overflow. Mobile: nav chip hides with the links, footer chip stays, no horizontal overflow.
• Both chips measured against the .chip spec — pill radius, hairline at 6% ink, soft shadow, 13.5px.
• All three surfaces carrying this chrome render both chips with no page errors.

Not run: next build, since a dev server held .next throughout. The ISR path is standard and every failure is caught, but worth a build before merge.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated
wave	Ready	Preview	Sep 21, 2026 6:10pm UTC